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1 Forthcoming in a special issue of Analyse und Kritik  on “The Normative Turn Away from Marxism” WHY MARXISM STILL DOES NOT NEED NORMATIVE THEORY Brian Leiter [email protected]  August 10 , 2015 Marx, early and late, had normative opinions, opinions about what was good and bad, right and wrong, valuable and disvaluable. What he did not have, except inchoately in the 1844 Manuscripts, was a normative theory , that is a theory t hat purported to justify, discursively and systematically, his normative opinions, to show them to be rationally obligatory and objectively valid. In this regard, Marx was obviously not alone: almost everyone, including those who lead what are widely regarded as exemplary “moral” lives, decide and act on the basis of normative intuitions and inclinations that fall far short of a theory. The one candidate f or a normative theory in Marx, in the 1844 Manuscripts (Marx 1932/1959), is not a ve ry promising one, involving as it does dubious speculation about the essential nature of human beings and normative claims that run counter to the mature Marx’s vie ws about morality and value, in particular, the view he shared with Engels that because moral opinions are determined by the existing relations of production, we can not know what morality would be characteristic of a society that did not have capitalist relations of production. Later Marx’s insight should temper enthusiasm for the speculations of the early Marx. 1  1 The early Marx held that under capitalism, individuals suffered from alienation (  Entfremdung ) from their essential nature. While alienation might have distinctive phen omenological markers, these have only evidential significance: alienation is fundamentally an objective failure to realize one’s essential nature. But does man really have an essential nature a nd if so, what is it? The core idea in the 1844 Manuscripts, is that humans only flourish when they freely engage in productive activity (rather than engaging in it to meet basic human needs), recognize their own dependence on cooperative productive activity, and, in particular, recognize that it is essential to the very nature of the species to which they belong that they engage in such self-aware productivity activity. Marx’s characterization of the “species-  being” of humans is, to put it gently, a claim of dubious epistemic status. It is certainly no part of serious biology, either then or since, and it is not clear it does any explanatory work in making sense of historical transformation. It has attracted, to be sure, the attention of the worst kind of bourgeois armchair

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/feb/21/marx-and-the-giraffe-1/
http://bostonreview.net/world/emily-clough-effective-altruism-ngos
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?_r=1
http://bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism
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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-the-trader-who-donates-half-his-pay.html?_r=1
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-the-trader-who-donates-half-his-pay.html?_r=1
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http://politicalphilosopher.net/2015/03/14/featured-philosop-her-hallie-liberto/
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/dec/20/on-your-marx/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/sep/25/dictator-marx/

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